Zoom

This provocative wordless volume can be ``read'' either from front to back or even from back to front. Either way, it's a startling experience. Its illustrations ``zoom'' out, as though a viewer has rapidly backed away from each. For example, the first painting, of a jagged-edged red shape, turns out to be a detail of a rooster's comb; as the pages turn, the bird diminishes in importance, until the barn where he stands is shown to be a toy on a magazine's cover. That magazine dangles from the hand of a dozing boy, who himself becomes but a smudge on an advertising billboard. These shifts in perspective repeat until the book abandons earth altogether. The last image is a tiny white sphere-our planet-against a night sky. The bold color and level of detail in Banyai's cartoons recall ``Prince Valiant'' or another of the ``realistic'' Sunday comics. If the concept is not wholly new, the execution is superior. Readers are in for a perpetually surprising-and even philosophical-adventure. All ages. (Mar.)